Cheating My Way Through Double Dragon on 3DS

Image: VG Museum

The Virtual Console on Nintendo 3DS may not have a lot of games, but at least Nintendo is doing some cherry-picking of the best games of the era (between the black-and-white Game Boy and the Game Boy Color there were nearly 1000 games released in the U.S. alone).

One of the currently available downloadable classics that I dumped many an hour into back in the day is Double Dragon, a reasonably competent version of the quintessential beat-em-up. Besides being a decent way to waste $4 and a few hours while you’re waiting for the next good 3DS game, it’s an excellent time to abuse the hell out of the Virtual Console’s “restore point” feature.

Double Dragon comes from the “Oh no, our game is only 20 minutes long so let’s make it impossible” school of classic game design. You can get halfway through the game without breaking a sweat, punching and kicking street thugs into the pavement with reckless abandon. (As a kid I found that the most efficient way to dispatch them was to punch twice and then kick twice, a combination that immediately kills every low-level enemy.)

But somewhere around the mid-point of Mission 3, where you have to fight a giant musclebound Abobo on a tiny ledge with no room for maneuvering and every possibility of you simply falling to your instant death, Double Dragon starts throwing up every possible barrier to your success. If you do beat him, congratulations, now you just have to do the whole second half of this level without dying or you go all the way back to the beginning.

Of course, the second half of this level includes jumping across moving platforms, something that your hero does with all the effortless grace of a hippopotamus on NyQuil. This Abobo fight turns out to mark the end of Double Dragon the beat-em-up and the beginning of Double Dragon the most awful platforming game ever.

But there is hope: The Virtual Console, like any good emulator, lets you save and restore your game wherever you like. So you can just mark your progress right before the Abobo fight or anything. It’s still a difficult game, but now it’s beatable with a reasonable amount of effort.

The promise of going back to games that absolutely stymied me as a child and that are now completable makes the black-and-white Virtual Console make a little more sense. Not only do I not feel bad about it, I feel like cheating finally evens the odds.